The Alex Macdonald lecture is an annual event organised by the Brisbane Labour History Association. It commemorates former Qld TLC Secretary Alex Macdonald and the critical role unions have played in the Qld Labour Movement. The Australian Labor Party stood apart from the Second Socialist International, the body that sought to bring together socialist parties from around the world between 1889 and 1914. There were small socialist groups in Australia that did identify with the International, but they lacked the resources to send their own representatives to the congresses. For its part, the Second International was heavily Eurocentric in its composition, but it did attract delegates from the Americas, Japan, and elsewhere.
Despite the political gap between Australian labourism and European socialist parties, European socialists took a keen interest in developments on the other side of the earth, especially in reports of Australia as a “workingman’s paradise”, with advanced industrial relations legislation and the world’s first government led by members of the labour movement. Thanks to Russel Ward, we have long known of the short book by the reformist French socialist Albert Métin, Socialism without Doctrine. The spectrum of European socialists with an interest in Australian conditions was much broader than Métin, however.
